As it opens its 2014 World Cup campaign against Ghana on Monday, the U.S. men's national soccer team will take the field with a highly unusual command structure: At any moment, any one of four or five different players might be barking out orders.

First there is the team's actual captain, Clint Dempsey, who is roughly equal in stature to the tireless midfielder Michael Bradley. Next we have star goalkeeper Tim Howard, a veteran of England's Premier League, and defender DaMarcus Beasley, a four-time World Cup participant who has played nearly every position on the team. At other times, the players take their cues from the aggressive German-born midfielder Jermaine Jones or striker Jozy Altidore.

"In a way everyone is a leader out there," Beasley said.

When it comes to the science of team leadership, the only thing most athletes agree upon is that team leadership is important. What it should look like, and how it ought to function, are basically anyone's guess.

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When asked, the U.S. team seems to view its many-headed approach as an embarrassment of riches. "It's important on the field that there isn't only one guy, that we have a whole team," Jones said.

But if the U.S. fails to emerge from its Group of Death with Germany, Portugal and Ghana to play in the tournament's knockout phase, everything about its structure will be dissected. Surely one of the first items to be plopped onto the examination table will be the diffuse nature of its leadership.

In March 2013, after head coach Jurgen Klinsmann dropped former longtime captain Carlos Bocanegra from the team, he called Dempsey, an attacking midfielder, on his cellphone to tell him he was the team's new leader. When the U.S. kicks off against Ghana here in Natal, Dempsey will be wearing the traditional captain's armband.

But when Dempsey skipped last summer's Gold Cup tournament, it was Beasley who took on the captain's role. And last March, when anonymous quotes questioning the team's direction began to appear in news reports, it was Bradley who stood up in the locker room to talk about the importance of keeping any complaints inside the team.

On Sunday in Natal, Bradley joined Dempsey and Klinsmann in a pre-match news conference that traditionally only involves the head coach and captain. A U.S. Soccer spokesman said the team has the option to add another player to the podium if it chooses to.

In international soccer, the captain is usually the undisputed on-field commander. He has unwritten special privileges to push and prod his teammates and to challenge the referee's decisions the most stridently. The German powerhouse teams of the 1970s were indisputably run by Franz Beckenbauer, just as the French from 1998-2006 could easily have been called "Les (Zinedine) Zidanes" instead of Les Bleus. Spain in 2010 was the domain of Iker Casillas; Steven Gerrard is the picture of authority and fiery leadership for England.

Dempsey doesn't subscribe to the idea that a captain has to be a human bull horn. He has never embraced the captain's role in a rah-rah way and has been known to disappear in despair for long stretches when things don't go well. He says he prefers to lead by example.

Before the World Cup, Dempsey said the U.S. was "lucky" to have veterans like Howard and Bradley "who have leadership qualities that the players can feed off."

On the field, it is Bradley who often quarterbacks the squad, yelling at teammates to attack, to feed him the ball or chase back on defense. Part of this is a function of his central position on the field—Dempsey is usually off to the side focusing on making deep runs into opposing territory. But the other U.S. players make it clear that after Bradley, there are many others whose voices set the tone.

Jones is another "leadership type" on the field, said defender Fabian Johnson, "or even from the back Tim Howard. The center players are always trying to communicate," he said.

Brad Guzan, the backup goalkeeper said the on-field leadership "all begins with the goalkeeper and the center backs." One of those center backs, Omar Gonzalez, said: "Clint is the captain, but we have good speakers, starting with Tim, Michael Bradley in the middle and Clint up front."

Jones said it's good to have different leadership styles to help in different situations: "I can push the guys and then someone a little quieter can relax the guys," he explained.

Asked to describe the team's leadership model, Howard, the goalkeeper, said "Clint Dempsey is the captain of the ship and we go where he takes it."

But he also said that once the game starts, he commands the back of the field, orchestrating the defense—something that makes sense because he has the best view of oncoming attack. "When I do it, it's usually with some urgency," he said. "Every goalkeeper has to have leadership qualities. That is the requisite of the position."

Tim Chandler, a German-American defender, made one thing clear about the team's leadership. When it comes to controlling the locker-room sound system, there is only one captain: Tim Howard.

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